lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

It is appalling the number of manuscripts we receive for review for Knowledge Organization, that are about things like ontologies and taxonomies and domain analyses, and that cite absolutely no literature from the domain of knowledge organization.

Usually my first intuitive reaction is to think the authors simply were negligent in submitting their siloed papers to us without checking that our journal is published by a scientific society that might expect its own science to be used. Sometimes I have a second intuitive reaction that the authors are so siloed they do not even know that domains other than their own exist and have their own literatures. I suppose both of these are true to some extent.

Lately I have come to see that there is increasingly no connection–no synthesis, no syndesis, not even any syncopation–in the evolution of theory. I think this has something to do with the habits of researchers to conduct so-called literature reviews online using Google Scholar, or worse just Google alone, and never bothering even to go to the many multi-disciplinary indexing services available online through most research libraries (this ought to be demonstrable empirically; perhaps one could take a random sample of published articles and actually search for relevant literature? Never mind that this is the responsibility of peer-reviewers!). Internet resources usually provide something quasi-relevant (remember Patrick Wilson’s excoriation that relevance often means “satisfactory”?–see Two Kinds of Power), enough to fill out the tiny tweet-like excuses for paragraphs most people manage to type these days. But this is no proper approach to science.

Theory requires connection and connection requires sequence in human thought. In order to make sense of an empirical observation all of the science available that can be brought to bear must be connected. To move that empirical observation forward as an hypothesis, or to move the hypothesis forward as a theory requires that observations be classified cumulatively. It all requires “syn”–synthesis, syndesis, syncopation.

If either of the people reading this blog are considering contributing to the science of knowledge organization let them hie at once to the ISKO website and use the powerful new KO literature search tool: http://www.isko.org/lit.html. While they’re at it, let’s urge them to go to the ISKO member’s portal at Ergon-Verlag http://www.ergon-verlag.de/isko_ko/ where they now can find KO from 1993 to the present and AIKO from 2006 to the present (and soon will find the entire backlog).